| Nâzım Hikmet Ran | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 January 1902 Salonica, Ottoman Empire, today Thessaloniki, Greece1 |
| Died | 3 June 1963 (aged 61) Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, USSR |
| Occupation | poet, playwright, novelist, memoirist |
| Turkish literature |
|---|
| By category |
| Epic tradition |
| Folk tradition |
| Ottoman era |
| Republican era |
Nâzım Hikmet Ran (born January 17, 1902 in Salonica, Ottoman Empire (present-day Thessaloniki) – died June 3, 1963 in Moscow, Soviet Union),[1][2] commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet (Turkish pronunciation: [naːˈzɯm hicˈmet]), was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements".[3] Described as a "romantic communist"[4] and "romantic revolutionary",[3] he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.
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He came from a cosmopolitan and distinguished family of Polish and Circassian ancestry, his father Hikmet Bey was the son of Mehmed Nazım Pasha and his mother Celile Hanım was the grand-daughter of Mehmed Ali Pasha, who was of German origin. His maternal great-grandfather, Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha, (former Konstantin Polkozic-Borzecki 1826-1876) in Ottoman Empire, was of Polish origin and later converted to Islam, and authored "Les Turcs anciens et modernes” in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), 1869 which is considered one of the first works of national Turkist political thoughts. His uncle Enver Celaleddin Pasha was on the Ottoman Army General Staff.
Nâzım was born on January 17, 1902, in Salonica, the westernmost metropolis of the Ottoman Empire (today Thessaloniki in Greece), where his father served as a government official.[1][2] He attended the Taşmektep Primary School in the Göztepe district of Constantinople[5][6][7] as part of Atatürk's national reforms,[8][9] and later enrolled in the junior high school section of the prestigious Galatasaray High School in the Beyoğlu district, where he began to learn French; but in 1913 he was transferred to the Numune Mektebi in the Nişantaşı district. In 1918 he graduated from the Ottoman Naval School in Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands located in the Sea of Marmara, to the southeast of Constantinople. His school days coincided with a period of political upheaval as the Ottoman government entered the First World War allying itself with Germany. For a brief period he was assigned as a naval officer to the Ottoman cruiser Hamidiye, but in 1919 he became seriously ill, and not being able to fully recover, was exempted from naval service in 1920.
In 1921, together with his friends Vâlâ Nûreddin (Vâ-Nû), Yusuf Ziya Ortaç and Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel, he went to İnebolu in Anatolia in order to join the Turkish War of Independence; from there he (together with Vâlâ Nûreddin) walked to Ankara, where the Turkish liberation movement was headquartered. In Ankara they were introduced to Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) who wanted the two friends to write a poem that would invite and inspire the Turkish volunteers in Constantinople and elsewhere to join their struggle. This poem was much appreciated, and Muhittin Bey (Birgen) decided to appoint them as teachers to the Sultani (high-college) in Bolu, rather than sending them to the front as soldiers. However, their communist views were not appreciated by the conservative officials in Bolu, and the two decided to go to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to experience in first person the results of the Russian Revolution of 1917, arriving there on September 30, 1921. In July 1922 the two friends went to Moscow, where Hikmet studied Economics and Sociology at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the early 1920s. There, he was influenced by the artistic experiments of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, as well as the ideological vision of Lenin.[4]
Despite writing his first poems in syllabic meter, Nazım Hikmet distinguished himself from the "syllabic poets" in concept. With the development of his poetic conception, the narrow forms of syllabic verse became too limiting for his style and he set out to seek new forms for his poems.
He was affected by the young Soviet poets who advocated Futurism. On his return to Turkey, he became the charismatic leader of the Turkish avant-garde, producing streams of innovative poems, plays and film scripts.[4] Breaking the boundaries of the syllabic meter, he changed his form and preferred writing in free verse which harmonised with the rich vocal properties of the Turkish language.
He has been compared by Turkish and non-Turkish men of letters to such figures as Federico García Lorca, Louis Aragon, Mayakovsky and Pablo Neruda. Although his work bears resemblance to these poets and owes them occasional debts of form and stylistic device, his literary personality is unique in terms of the synthesis he made of iconoclasms and lyricism, of ideology and poetic diction.[3]:19
Many of his poems have been adapted into songs by the composer Zülfü Livaneli. A part of his work has been translated into Greek by Yiannis Ritsos, and some of these translations have been arranged by the Greek composers Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos.
Hikmet's imprisonment in the 1940s became a cause célèbre among intellectuals worldwide; a 1949 committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre campaigned for Hikmet's release.[10]
On April 8, 1950, Hikmet commenced a hunger strike in protest against the parliament's not including an amnesty law in its agenda before its closing for the upcoming general election. He was then transferred from the prison in Bursa first to the infirmary of Sultanahmet Jail in Istanbul and later to Paşakapısı Prison.[11] Seriously ill, Hikmet ceased his strike on April 23, the National Sovereignty and Children's Day for a while. His doctors requested to treat him in a hospital for three months that was not allowed by the officials. Since his imprisonment status did not change, he resumed hunger strike on the morning of May 2.[10]
His strike created much reaction in the country. Signature campaigns were launched and a magazine named after him was published. His mother Celile began hunger strike on May 9, followed by renowned Turkish poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rıfat the next day. Upon the new political situation after the 1950 Turkish general election held on May 14, the strike was ended five days later on May 19, the Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day. He was finally released through a general amnesty law enacted by the new government.[10]
On November 22, 1950, the World Council of Peace announced that Nazım Hikmet was among the recipients of the International Peace Prize along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Pablo Neruda.[10]
Later on, Hikmet escaped from Turkey to Romania on a ship via the Black Sea and from there moved to the USSR.
When the upspring of the EOKA struggle took place in Cyprus, Hikmet believed that the population of Cyprus could live together peacefully and called on the Turkish minority to support the Greek Cypriots to achieve the demand of ending the British rule.[12] "),
Persecuted for decades by the Republic of Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow on June 3, 1963 at 6.30 am while picking up a morning newspaper at the door at his summer house in Peredelkino away from his beloved homeland.[13] He is buried in Moscow's famous Novodevichy Cemetery, where his imposing tombstone is even today a place for pilgrimage by Turks and many others from around the world. His final will was to be buried under a plane-tree (platanus) in any village cemetery in Anatolia, which was never realized.
Despite his persecution by the Turkish state, Nâzım Hikmet was always revered by the Turkish nation. His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, i.e. Human Landscape from my Country) as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı Destanı, i.e. The Epic of the War of Independence) and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvâyi Milliye, i.e. Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest patriotic literary works in Turkey.
Hikmet had Polish and Turkish citizenship. The latter was revoked in 1959, and restored in 2009.[14][15] His family has been asked if they want his remains repatriated from Russia.[16]
Nâzım's poem Kız Çocuğu (The Little Girl) conveys a plea for peace from a seven-year-old girl, ten years after she has perished in the atomic bomb attack at Hiroshima. It has achieved popularity as an anti-war message and has been performed as a song by a number of singers and musicians both in Turkey and worldwide,[17] which is also known in English by various other titles, including "I come and Stand at Every Door" and "Hiroshima Girl".[18]
The song was later covered by
In 2005, famed Amami Ōshima singer Chitose Hajime collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto by translating Kız Çocuğu into Japanese by retitling it as 'Shinda Onna no Ko' [死んだ女の子]). It was performed live at the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on the eve of the 60th Anniversary (August the 5th, 2005) of Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The song later appeared as a bonus track on Chitose's Hanadairo album in 2006.
How do you propose to get it? Do you want to get it through the cooperation of Turkey where the men in the ranks get 23 cents a month the first year and 32 cents the second year, or do you want to get an American division and equip it and send it over to Turkey which would cost you 10 times as much?—John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State, 1955
He also opposed the Korean War, in which Turkey participated. After the Senate address of John Foster Dulles, who served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, where he valued Turkish soldiers at 23 cents a month[21] compared with the lowest echelon U.S. soldiers at $70,[22] Nazım Hikmet wrote a protest poem criticising the policies of the United States. This poem is titled "23 Sentlik Askere Dair" (On the soldier worth 23 cents).
4 December 1945[23]
February 1948[24]
Nazım Hikmet's Davet ("Invitation") is one of his best known poems. Nazım tells what he wants, and what life should be like, in the poem's last lines about living "alone and free like a tree" and "in brotherly love like a forest".
| Davet | Invitation | |
|---|---|---|
| Dörtnala gelip Uzak Asya'dan | Galloping from the Far East | |
| Akdeniz'e bir kısrak başı gibi uzanan | reaching to the Mediterranean like a mare head | |
| bu memleket bizim. | this land is ours. | |
| Bilekler kan içinde, dişler kenetli, ayaklar çıplak | Wrists in blood, teeth clenched, feet bare | |
| ve ipek bir halıya benzeyen toprak, | and like a silk carpet this land, | |
| bu cehennem, bu cennet bizim. | this hell, this heaven is ours. | |
| Kapansın el kapıları, bir daha açılmasın, | Let the alien doors be closed, let them not open again, | |
| yok edin insanın insana kulluğunu, | abolish man's servitude to man, | |
| bu dâvet bizim. | this invitation is ours. | |
| Yaşamak bir ağaç gibi tek ve hür | To live like a tree in solitude and free | |
| ve bir orman gibi kardeşçesine, | and like a forest in solidarity, | |
| bu hasret bizim. | this yearning is ours. | |
| Nazım Hikmet (1902–1963)[25] |
Hikmet sent a message to the Turks of Cyprus, emphasizing that Cyprus was always Greek. [...] (The Turkish Cypriots) must support Greek Cypriots to achieve the liberation from British imperialism. [...] Only when the British imperialists leave the island the Turkish residents of the island will live truly free. [...] Those who try to make Turks oppose Greeks, actually only support the interest of the foreign ruler.
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